Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • SurveyJS - Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App
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  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SVM-Face-and-Object-Detection-Shader

    SVM using HOG descriptors implemented in fragment shaders

    https://github.com/SCRN-VRC/SVM-Face-and-Object-Detection-Shader Object detection in a shader

    - Cellular automata: people finding awesome patterns, some great project:

    https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life

  • rvc

    A 32-bit RISC-V emulator in a shader (and C)

    List of scenes that I am particularly fond of:

    - Minecrat computer engineering: Culminated with this playable 3d simplified minecraft clone (CPU+GPU) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I

    - Shader computing scene: More of a subculture of an already marvelous subculture, people are finding weird ways to compute with shader

    https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/ Risc V emulator in a shader

  • SurveyJS

    Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  • RAVE

    Official implementation of the RAVE model: a Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder

    I'm in the deep learning music scene, which is due for its stable diffusion moment in the next year or two. The (primarily) timbre transfer system called RAVE is where I'm starting, and my contribution is to optimize the system to improve training time.

    [] https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE/tree/master/rave

  • example-chrome-extension

    Example Chrome Extension - open source examples for Chrome extension APIs

    Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app, and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3.

    I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no books on how to build them, so I wrote one: https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the different crazy things they can do.

  • uBlock

    uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

    The best mv2 repository would of course be ublock origin: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

  • AdGuardMV3

    AdGuard browser extension prototype based on the new Manifest V3

  • TablaM

    The practical relational programing language for data-oriented applications

    I start with FoxPro so eventually get on the board of making a [version of it](https://tablam.org), and now I'm regular at

    - https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/

    and because this working on a RDBMs, so:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/databasedevelopment/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • neocities

    Neocities.org - the web site. The entire thing. Yep, we're completely open source.

    * https://neocities.org

    I think the main focus of those communities is recapturing the spirit of the (arguably more fun) internet of the 90s to early 2000s. They're not specifically dedicated to static site minimalism, but there's definitely a large overlap.

  • Speed-Run-Sidebar

    A Display + Controller to integrate with OBS

    Speed running Mario Kart 64.

    I'm not great. I enjoy it though. It's also been a place to play around with small a programming project to make it easier to update my streaming UI. https://github.com/Forge36/Speed-Run-Sidebar

  • FreePSXBoot

    Exploit to allow loading arbitrary code on the PSX using only a memory card (no game needed)

    Most of the SDK has been tested and confirmed to be fully functional on real hardware, but there is some copy protection you will have to get around in order to run arbitrary software on a PS1. The traditional solution is to perform disc swapping or install a modchip, but nowadays we also have softmods [1] that make the process as easy as inserting a specially formatted memory card (which can be prepared using a PS2, or even a PS1 by swapping discs).

    You are not required to use CDs either. With the help of some code and linker script magic, you can build an image that can be booted directly from a cheat cartridge (or simply a parallel EEPROM) connected to the console's expansion bus, bypassing the copy protection checks entirely. There are also debugging tools that, once loaded, let you download an executable into RAM for quick testing and manage memory cards using a modified serial cable [2].

    [1] https://github.com/brad-lin/FreePSXBoot

    [2] https://schnappy.xyz/?building_a_serial_psx_cable

  • new-wave

    Stack Computer Bytecode Interpreters: The New Wave

    https://github.com/LAC-Tech/new-wave/blob/master/type.ml

    Looks like my last attempt failed when I got bogged down prototyping a type system in Ocaml then trying to port that to Zig.

    So in my case - it's not because I use them and they suck, it's because I find stuff like implementing type systems and GC very hard, and usually more practical things start wanting my attention more.

  • WaveFunctionCollapse

    Bitmap & tilemap generation from a single example with the help of ideas from quantum mechanics

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfc-DQorohc

    Craig Reynolds said the name "Boids" was inspired by The Producers Concierge scene, so that's how you should pronounce it:

    Boids. Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice ridden Boids. Boids. You get my drift?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk

    The other really cool rabbit hole to explore for generating tiles and even arbitrary graph based content (I'm sold: hexagons are the bestagons!) is "Wave Function Collapse", which doesn't actually have anything to do with quantum mechanics (it just sounds cool), but is actually a kind of constraint solver related to sudoku solvers.

    https://escholarship.org/content/qt3rm1w0mn/qt3rm1w0mn_noSpl...

    Maxim Gumin's work: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

    Paul Merrell's work:

    https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/

    https://paulmerrell.org/research/

    Oskar Stålberg's work:

    https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/784847588893814785

    https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

    There's a way to define cellular automata rules by giving examples of the before and after patterns, and WFC is kind of like a statistical constraint solving version of that.

    So it's really easy for artists to define rules just by drawing! Not even requiring any visual programming, but you can layer visual programming on top of it.

    That's something that Alexander Repenning's "AgentSheets" supported (among other stuff): you could define cellular automata rules by before-and-after examples, wildcards and variables, and attach additional conditions and actions with a visual programming language.

    AgentSheets and other cool systems are described in this classic paper: “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems.

    http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

    Chaim Gingold wrote a comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" at HARC, which includes AgentSheets, Alan Kay's favorites: Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:

    http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

    Chaim Gingold has analyzed the SimCity (classic) code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

    >SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016).

    >These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

    >The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

    >Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

    https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

    Agentsheets: Alexander Repenning (1993–)

    Interacting agents are embedded and interact within

  • sandspiel

    Creative cellular automata browser game

  • model-synthesis

    Model synthesis is a technique for generating 2D and 3D shapes from examples.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfc-DQorohc

    Craig Reynolds said the name "Boids" was inspired by The Producers Concierge scene, so that's how you should pronounce it:

    Boids. Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice ridden Boids. Boids. You get my drift?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL6mTMShVyk

    The other really cool rabbit hole to explore for generating tiles and even arbitrary graph based content (I'm sold: hexagons are the bestagons!) is "Wave Function Collapse", which doesn't actually have anything to do with quantum mechanics (it just sounds cool), but is actually a kind of constraint solver related to sudoku solvers.

    https://escholarship.org/content/qt3rm1w0mn/qt3rm1w0mn_noSpl...

    Maxim Gumin's work: https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

    Paul Merrell's work:

    https://paulmerrell.org/model-synthesis/

    https://paulmerrell.org/research/

    Oskar Stålberg's work:

    https://twitter.com/OskSta/status/784847588893814785

    https://oskarstalberg.com/game/wave/wave.html

    There's a way to define cellular automata rules by giving examples of the before and after patterns, and WFC is kind of like a statistical constraint solving version of that.

    So it's really easy for artists to define rules just by drawing! Not even requiring any visual programming, but you can layer visual programming on top of it.

    That's something that Alexander Repenning's "AgentSheets" supported (among other stuff): you could define cellular automata rules by before-and-after examples, wildcards and variables, and attach additional conditions and actions with a visual programming language.

    AgentSheets and other cool systems are described in this classic paper: “A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple. It covered many of my favorite systems.

    http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf

    Chaim Gingold wrote a comprehensive "Gadget Background Survey" at HARC, which includes AgentSheets, Alan Kay's favorites: Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:

    http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...

    Chaim Gingold has analyzed the SimCity (classic) code and visually documented how it works, in his beautiful "SimCity Reverse Diagrams":

    >SimCity reverse diagrams: Chaim Gingold (2016).

    >These reverse diagrams map and translate the rules of a complex simulation program into a form that is more easily digested, embedded, disseminated, and and discussed (Latour 1986).

    >The technique is inspired by the game designer Stone Librande’s one page game design documents (Librande 2010). If we merge the reverse diagram with an interactive approach—e.g. Bret Victor’s Nile Visualization (Victor 2013), such diagrams could be used generatively, to describe programs, and interactively, to allow rich introspection and manipulation of software.

    >Latour, Bruno (1986). “Visualization and cognition”. In: Knowledge and Society 6 (1986), pp. 1– 40. Librande, Stone (2010). “One-Page Designs”. Game Developers Conference. 2010. Victor, Bret (2013). “Media for Thinking the Unthinkable”. MIT Media Lab, Apr. 4, 2013.

    https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityReverseDiagr...

    Agentsheets: Alexander Repenning (1993–)

    Interacting agents are embedded and interact within

  • CAM6

    Cellular Automata Machine (CAM6) Simulator

    https://www.youtube.com

    I hate it when a program I wrote mocks me. In Lex Fridman's interview of Steven Wolfram, he demonstrates the machine learning functions in Mathematica by taking a photo of himself, which identifies him as a .... (I won't give it away):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA&t=2h20m05s

    Here's a video I recently recorded of the CAM-6 simulator I implemented decades ago, and rewrote in JavaScript a few years ago.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck

    I recorded that demo to show to Norman Margolus, who co-wrote the book and wrote the CAM6 PC Forth code and many rules, so it's pretty long and technical and starts out showing lots of code, but I'm sure you'll totally get and appreciate it. I linked to a pdf copy of the book in the comments, as well as the source code and playable app.

    Demo of Don Hopkins' CAM6 Cellular Automata Machine simulator.

    Live App: https://donhopkins.com/home/CAM6

    Github Repo: https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/

    Javacript Source Code: https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...

    PDF of CAM6 Book: https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf

    Comments from the code:

        // This code originally started life as a CAM6 simulator written in C

  • lazybasic

    A teeny, tiny BASIC interpreter

    I wrote a script that builds seamless background images out of sets of smaller images, kind of like contact sheets. This started for a comic book themed web site so that the background image could be a collage of comic covers with a special theme ( Christmas, celebration of a comic artist, ...etc. ) I am still cultivating the script so that it'll be friendly enough for public use. I'll place it on Github when that happens.

    I like to tinker with my own compilers / interpreters. I had read an article recently about someone building an example Linux shell and I wanted to try a couple of ideas where I thought I'd take a different approach than the author. I ended up building a very, very tiny BASIC interpreter in C. My proof that the interpreter was "good enough" was whether or not I could write a script in the dialect of BASIC to display the lyrics to the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

    https://github.com/jimlawless/lazybasic

  • op25

    Fork of osmocom OP25 by boatbod

    Using OP25[1] with RTL-SDR dongles to implement scanners for trunking P25 radio systems on a computer. And as a sidebar to that, listening in on geographically remote public safety radio systems using Broadcastify[2]. It's basically the old "radio scanner" culture, but taken online and distributed worldwide. People listen to all sorts of stuff, but given my background as a former firefighter and former 911 dispatcher, my main interest is listening to public safety dispatch stuff.

    That said, another commenter below mentioned modern "phreaking" and how it's become more radio centric... and while I won't admit to doing anything illegal, let's just say that there's some interesting stuff you can do / look at / listen to these days, especially with ubiquitous and inexpensive SDR hardware and related resources. See the recent story about the KrakenSDR passive radar stuff, and some of the papers that are out there about P25 security flaws, some of the automobile hacking stuff that's RF based, etc., etc. There's a fascinating world out there buzzing around on invisible electromagnetic fields... and you can tap into it with a $30 dongle and a Raspberry Pi (or your PC).

    [1]: https://github.com/boatbod/op25

  • gbs-control

    - Sometimes the web UI won't have 1280x960 checked, even if it's outputting a 960p signal. I don't know if this is connected to the vertical shift bug, or if .

    Again I'd have to dig into the GBS-C source code to find out why mode changing behaves oddly. There will be a lot of learning to do, understand the software state and chip registers and how they correlate to profile settings and input/output behavior. I suppose I could file a bug at https://github.com/ramapcsx2/gbs-control/issues, but somehow I feel reluctant to do so, partly because I didn't fully understand the setup and don't know if many of these bugs wouldn't happen on a VGA CRT, partly just learned helplessness and not knowing if my bug report is detailed enough or will be ignored or attacked, partly because I'd prefer to chat with the developers in Discord/Matrix outside of a higher-stakes formal bug report or a forum I've never posted at before.

  • virtualagc

    Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) software

  • solid

    Solid - Re-decentralizing the web (project directory) (by solid)

  • kana

    Single cell analysis in the browser

    usig modern web technologies to develop high performance scientific applications. We built a highly optimized, interactive and exploratory application for single-cell data analysis[1]. it runs purely in the browser with no backend and scales upto 200K cells. similar efforts include the biowasm project [2].

    [1] https://github.com/jkanche/kana

  • biowasm

    WebAssembly modules for genomics

  • LibreQoS

    A Quality of Experience and Smart Queue Management system for ISPs. Leverage CAKE to improve network responsiveness, enforce bandwidth plans, and reduce bufferbloat.

    I keep hoping everyone will have that Aha! moment one day, and we'll all have cake. https://libreqos.io

  • weird

    Discontinued Generative art in Common Lisp

    I like the drawingbots discord server, and this blog: https://inconvergent.net/#about, also follow #plottertwitter

  • kinoshita.eti.br

    kinow website

    >- Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first, it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the world wide web (WWW) as we know it.

    I kept the colors I used before, but dropped JavaScript and tried to use CSS that is compatible with multiple browsers. It has been a learning experience, but very interesting to see how far I can get to with just HTML and CSS.

    Now I've started focusing on semantic web tags, and accessibility testing. Much easier without JavaScript.

    - Site: https://kinoshita.eti.br/

    - Source: https://github.com/kinow/kinoshita.eti.br/

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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